


dysonans

by hazard



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Family History, M/M, Magic, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-04
Updated: 2013-08-30
Packaged: 2017-12-22 09:30:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/911641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hazard/pseuds/hazard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Stiles was twelve, after it all went down and there was nothing left to do but put things in boxes and then give the boxes away (or pretend to, and hide small boxes in the top of the closet, and big boxes under the bed, and the sewing basket in the closet under the stairs, and some of her jewelry wrapped carefully in a plastic bag and some old newspaper and finally, closest to the bright stones, an old cotton dishrag, and stuff it in the back of the freezer behind the Bagel Bites), he found a collar. It was an old leather collar for a big dog, creaking with age, and it was closed so tightly that he couldn’t pry it open, not even when he slid his short fingernails under the rough stitching around the edges. It was like it was glued shut. They’d never had a dog.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first stab at writing after a six-year bout of laziness-induced writer's block, so it's going to be kind of touch and go at first. I've been lurking in the Teen Wolf fandom for a few months and I figured it's time I get my feet wet. You can find me on tumblr at madamovary.tumblr.com.

 

When Stiles was twelve, after it all went down and there was nothing left to do but put things in boxes and then give the boxes away (or pretend to, and hide small boxes in the top of the closet, and big boxes under the bed, and the sewing basket in the closet under the stairs, and some of her jewelry wrapped carefully in a plastic bag and some old newspaper and finally, closest to the bright stones, an old cotton dishrag, and stuff it in the back of the freezer behind the Bagel Bites), he found a collar. It was an old leather collar for a big dog, creaking with age, and it was closed so tightly that he couldn’t pry it open, not even when he slid his short fingernails under the rough stitching around the edges. It was like it was glued shut. They’d never had a dog.

He found it in a wooden chest in the basement, one with his mother’s name carved on the inside of the lid, and a faded pattern of little flowers painted around the edges. There were other things in there, letters and a few books, some old broken china and a cloth doll, but the collar caught his eye because it seemed so out of place. All his mother’s things were delicate, floral, as light and transparent as the dust motes that made him sneeze. This didn’t look like it was hers, but here it was, in the chest with her name on it, with the little flowers painted around the edges. 

He showed the collar to his father, who took it, frowning, and turned it over in his hands. 

"I don’t know, kid," Dad said. “Maybe she brought it with her. I’ve never seen it before. Where’d you get this, anyway?"

"One of the boxes." (He’d pushed the chest into a corner of the attic and stacked other boxes on top of it, the cardboard ones labeled “Christmas" and “Table Linen (fancy!!)" and “Taxes, 1994," and put a broken electric fan on top, just in case.) 

"Put it with the other stuff," Dad said. But he didn’t give it back immediately. He turned it over in his hands again and squinted at it like he knew he should recognize it, but didn’t. 

Stiles pulled the collar out of his father’s hands slowly and replaced it with the cup of coffee he was supposed to pretend didn’t smell like nail polish remover. 

He put the collar in his bottom drawer, under his old jeans, and forgot about it.

(No he didn’t.)

* * *

When Stiles was fourteen, he had a sudden rush of understanding about the collar, which made him sit up in bed and go “Oh. Oh, God, gross," late on a Wednesday night, and he had to drink half a bottle of Nyquil just to get back to sleep. 

(But that wasn’t it.)

* * *

When he was seventeen, desperately digging through the attic for his old baseball gear, his father’s hunting rifle, a fucking Ginsu knife set,  _anything_ , he found the chest again, but he ignored it in favor of the golf clubs leaning against the air conditioning duct and an old spade, wickedly sharp, from when his mother kept roses. He went back later, though, wet hair sticking to his forehead and his rubbed-raw skin still smelling faintly of blood and forest, and dug through the chest slowly, lifting out the letters first. They were mostly in Polish, but he recognized a few words, most of the names, and his grandmother’s crabbed handwriting. He had to hold them carefully so they wouldn’t shred or fall to pieces; his mother had been one of those people who folded all her letters into their own envelopes like in a Jane Austen adaptation on PBS, and the creases were so thin he could see his own skin straight through them. His grandmother had written about him and his father, about his mother’s sister who lived in Oregon, and something that included the words  _tree, love,_ and  _hound_ , as well as a recipe for kielbasa. He wasn’t sure about  _hound_ , though, since the word was actually  _lajdak_ , which meant “scoundrel" as well as “hound." (He knew that because his grandmother shouted it at his father every time he set foot in her dingy, onion-smelling house.) 

The books were old, too, definitely older than his mother, probably even older than his grandmother,  who was still stubbornly clinging to life out in Redding. In one of them he found a list of names four pages long written into the front of the book, almost like a family Bible. The leather on the book was as old and creaky as the collar he still kept in the bottom drawer, but it was warm to the touch, which was weird, since it was February and he could see his breath up in the unheated attic. The last name on the list was his mother’s. He took the books downstairs and put them in his nightstand, slipping the thin stack of letters under the cover of the biggest book, the one with the names.

For the first time since he thought he’d figured out what was up with the collar, he took it out again, turning it over in his hands the way his father had. Now that he saw it again, it looked too old, too unused to be… what he’d thought it was, which was more than a little relief. Also for the first time, he noticed it had little flowers embossed on it — not on the outside, which was still warm to the touch, although that could be the central heating. The flowers were on the inside, intricate little details set into the leather. He thought they might be the same ones that were painted on the chest.

(Later, when he found his Polish-English dictionary stuffed into the junk drawer of his desk, he looked up “wolf"on a whim and got:  _wilk_ , the general term, meaning wolf, German Shepherd, or straggler;  _kobieciarz_ , which technically meant wolf but mostly meant womanizer;  _jeść łapczywie_ , a verb that meant gobble; and finally, oddly, _dysonans_ : dissonance, discord, disharmony, and, of course, wolf.)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come say hi on tumblr!

"How does someone even become an emissary?" Stiles asked the universe, currently represented by Scott McCall.

 

"Why do you want to know how someone gets to be an emissary?" Scott button-mashed furiously, trying and failing to pick up a health pack. Somehow, werewolf coordination didn't extend to Halo. Or ice skating. Or bowling, if reports were to be believed. Sometimes Stiles wondered what being a werewolf was even good for if it didn't cover actual life skills. God knew backflipping wasn't going to get anyone into college. 

 

"It's -- you know, I mean." Stiles picked at the shock warning sticker on the back of his controller. On the screen, his character stood around shifting his weight back and forth while Scott's danced around the health pack. "You have claws. I have a bat. Had a bat. Your mom's bat. Which I broke over Voltron Wolf's face. And then your aluminum one from freshman year, I forgot, I have to give that back. There's got to be a better way to deal with my feeble humanity, man."

 

Scott stuck his tongue out, popping a menu open and then closed again before he finally picked the damn thing up. "I'm pretty sure some of it is native talent," he said. "I saw Deaton do a force field thing once. Or, well, I heard it. Peter threw a chair at him back when he was more evil and it just broke in pieces. That's, like, telekinesis. You don't have telekinesis."

 

"Maybe I can learn telekinesis," Stiles muttered. "I don't think Deaton was shattering chairs in the womb." 

 

Scott looked over at him, thumbing the pause button. Stiles picked at the sticker some more, not really feeling like meeting his eye. 

 

"I don't… I don't think telekinesis is something you can just learn," Scott said, and the gentleness in his tone made Stiles want to punch something. Not Scott, but something. Maybe something that looked like Scott. "Deaton and Miss Morrell are brother and sister, right? It's probably a family thing. Like werewolves."

 

Stiles shrugged, one-shouldered. "Werewolves aren't just a family thing. You got bit."

 

"So you want Deaton to bite you?" Scott had that dorky grin on his face again, like he knew he was being funny. Stiles rolled his eyes as expressively as possible, putting his whole neck into it. He was pretty good at it.

 

"No, dude, I just mean… Allison's been doing her whole warrior princess schtick since she was a kid, right? At least the archery part? She's got her ten thousand hours. I don't think I could ever be coordinated enough to pick up what she does, and it's too late anyway. I've never been a good shot -- my dad tried to teach me, my hands just kept shaking. I'm sick of getting stuck in the ambulance, you know?"

 

Scott shifted on the couch. "It's not like you're _useless_ ," he said kindly, and Stiles shifted from wanting to punch something Scott-shaped to just plain wanting to punch Scott. He didn't feel bad about it. In any relationship spanning more than ten years, occasional punchy feelings were basically a given.

 

Instead, he curled his left hand into the couch and squeezed until he felt the blood leave his knuckles. "Yeah, my Google-fu really saved the day in the bank vault. It only took _all night_ , the only day it would've been safe to break them out before the full moon. And I definitely know how to destroy a baseball bat with no visible results. I hung around unconscious in the Jeep for like two hours. I got super good at letting you escape every single full moon -- "

 

"Dude, stop." Scott gripped his shoulder, always a little too tight. He never forgot to be extra-gentle with Allison, but the weight of experience as a spindly asthmatic sometimes made him forget that Stiles was still breakable. "You're _not_ useless. You did figure out the bank thing, and you saved Cora and your dad and my mom -- "

 

"Once." Stiles chewed his lip. "My dad's not breathing great these days. I think Ms. Blake didn't heal him all the way." 

 

Scott was quiet for a moment. Then he unpaused the game. They shot some aliens.

 

Scott was gone a precise forty-five minutes later, apparently at his limit with Stiles's moping. Stiles didn't exactly blame him; he knew he could be pretty insufferable when he wanted to be, and right now he kind of wanted to be. Scott hadn't felt truly weak in a long time -- he'd been manipulated, led into traps and pushed around by every Alpha who rolled through town, but he'd had options. Stiles never seemed to have options anymore. He just ran around the background. The last truly useful thing he'd done, really, was chunk lacrosse balls at Scott in sophomore year. He didn't count the trick with the aluminum bat; anyone could've done that. Hell, most of his big save-the-day moment had been sliding down a hole that the assembled parents could've climbed up if they hadn't been trying to hold up the roof with Isaac. 

 

Maybe he could chunk lacrosse balls at the next werewolves they met. It couldn't be worse than the bat. 

 

 

* * * 

 

Chris Argent stared at Stiles. Stiles was trying to stare back, but it seemed like he needed to blink a whole lot more than Chris Argent did. Maybe that was a sniper thing.

 

"Okay, so." Scott clapped his hands together and everyone jumped minutely, except the Argents. Allison had her hands folded neatly on one knee, her hair pulled back sharply from her face. She'd stopped wearing lip gloss at some point in the last couple of months. It made her look older. "Here we all are."

 

Stiles cut a glance at Lydia, expecting a huffy sigh or for her to be picking at her manicure or something, but instead she was watching Scott attentively, with something like respect. _That_ was new. 

 

Scott didn't seem like he had anything to go after that. Or maybe he was pausing for effect, Stiles didn't really know. The tension crawled up the back of his spine like a phantom spider. "Let the first official meeting of the Beacon Hills Superfriends commence!" 

 

Everyone turned to look at him. That got the huffy sigh from Lydia, anyway. She flicked her hair behind one ear and turned back to watch Scott raptly. 

 

"I've asked you all here today because Derek's out of town, and no one trusts Peter, and we're looking pretty disorganized," Scott began, bracing his hands on his mother's kitchen table like a mafia don. "We need to talk about moving forward. Now that the Alpha Pack's disbanded and Ms. Blake's gone -- " 

 

"What happened to her, anyway?" Stiles cut in. "Somebody saw a body, right? Tell me somebody saw a body."

 

Scott shifted uncomfortably. Stiles leaned forward over the table. "Oh my _God_. Are you kidding? I know Gerard's stuck in a nursing home leaking from all his holes, but we're probably not going to get that lucky twice, and -- "

 

"She's gone." Lydia straightened the drape of her skirt. "I felt her. I promise she's 100% dead."

 

"What, is that a thing now? I thought all you could do was find bodies, not -- "

 

" _Stiles_." That was the Alpha voice. Scott's irises were tinged with red, but he pulled it back pretty quickly. Stiles almost wished he'd just let it loose. He felt like he was itching under his skin. At least Chris Argent had stopped staring at him. "She's dead. That's the end of it. Deucalion's lost his pack and his power and I'm pretty confident he's going to make a change for the better. Gerard's out of the picture. We've got as clean a field as we're ever going to get. We're here to talk about what to _do_ with that."

 

Allison glanced her father, then back at Scott. Her left hand twitched like she'd almost raised it and then thought better of it. "Dad and I have decided that we're working under a new code," she said. "Nous protégeons ceux qui ne peuvent pas se protéger eux mêmes. We protect those -- "

 

"Who cannot protect themselves," Lydia finished. Chris nodded, though his hand tightened on the sleeve of his jacket. Stiles would bet every dollar hidden in the Folgers can in his kitchen that there was a knife in there.

 

"Does that cover any pre-emptive action?" Stiles asked. "Like, for instance, the two Alpha werewolves canoodling with Beacon Hills High's most beautiful people?" 

 

Lydia shifted in her chair, but refused to look uncomfortable. "They were working under orders," she said. "Aiden said -- "

 

"They _killed Boyd_." 

 

" _Under orders_ ," Allison repeated. "We've all done some stupid things because people we trusted told us we had to."

 

Okay, Stiles could see where she was coming from, but it seemed a little flimsy. Getting manipulated by your creepy, leaky grandfather wasn't quite on the same page as getting coerced into murdering your entire pack, then several teenagers, as a mutually-beneficial power grab. He opened his mouth to say something along those lines, but Scott shot him a look, and the words died behind his clenched teeth. 

 

"There's a reason they're not here right now," Scott said patiently. "They're on probation. You guys are the ones I can trust." 

 

"What about your mom?" Stiles cut in. It was like he couldn't stop it. Something living in the pit of his stomach just kept crawling up his throat, shooting pure dickishness out of his mouth. He should get that looked at. "What about my dad? And Isaac's not here, I notice."

 

"Your dad's new to this. I want to be sure how much he can handle before we stick him in the middle of it, and he deserves a choice about how far in he wants to be." Stiles could've answered that for him -- Stiles's dad wanted to be right in the middle with his service weapon, no matter whether there was still scar tissue in his right lung. "I talked about this with my mom and Isaac earlier. He's, uh, he's helping her with the grocery shopping. I wanted to do this on my own."

 

He stood back from the table, folding his arms over his chest. He looked taller than usual, backlit by the sunset coming through the kitchen window. Suddenly, Stiles pictured Scott here an hour earlier, blocking out the conversation like a scene from the play, making sure he stood taller than all the others, moving around the table and standing at the head like the master of the house. For all that Stiles had been the one figuring out werewolf stuff ten months ago, Scott had always been better with people, and it was showing now, and combined with extra jolt of the Alpha mojo.

 

"I want us to be a pack. Derek told me that his family was mixed, werewolf and human, and they made it work until the -- hunters came. I think we can do that too. We're stronger together. Literally, for me and Isaac, but for you guys too." He let his arms uncross, the tips of his fingers just touching the table, building a connection. "If you're not on board, I won't blame you for getting out now. But if you are, I want you to know that I'll protect you with everything I have. We'll protect each other. Deaton said that things are going to be on their way because of what we did before the eclipse, and we need to be ready for them."

 

Here it came.

 

"Are you with me?"

 

Stiles watched everyone else watch Scott. One by one, they all gave signs of assent. Lydia beamed and briefly reached over to squeeze Scott's hand. The room seemed warmer, Stiles could feel the heat just a breath away from his skin, but he was freezing at his core. 

 

Outside the kitchen window, the sun went down over the Preserve.

 

 

* * *

 

Stiles caught up to Lydia outside her car, which had come back from the shop with no signs of deer damage. Apparently she didn't feel like the badge-of-honor bruise thing extended to her shiny blue Toyota. 

 

She turned around before he could call out for her. She looked less than surprised.

 

"So."

 

"So."

 

There was a moment of intensely awkward silence. Stiles hadn't talked to Lydia a whole lot since the whole kissing panic attack thing. In the moment, he'd been so shocked that he stopped breathing, and not entirely pleasantly. It had changed the way Lydia looked to him, like the golden aura that used to surround her was suddenly gone, leaving a beautiful, vaguely magical, but intensely familiar old friend in its wake. It was like the awkwardness was just force of habit. He felt an inch away from being a normal person around her -- within reach, but not quite grasped.

 

" _So_ , you're magic," he said. "How's that work?"

 

Lydia rolled her eyes at him. She was really good at it, too. If they'd ever actually had a chance, Stiles was sure that their children would have been 10% giant, constantly rolling eyeballs. Maybe that road was better off not taken. 

 

"Ms. Blake called me a banshee," she said. "I think I might not be completely human."

 

There was a moment of respectful silence for the weirdness of that admission.

 

"So you were born with it, is what you're saying." Stiles drew a line in the dirt in the McCall's yard with his toe. "You didn't, I don't know, read it somewhere, pick it up late, that kind of thing?"

 

Lydia shook her head. "It just… flowed into me," she said. "It felt like, when I finally admitted it -- like I'd been holding something back for a long time. You know, the way I used to be with Jackson. Pretending. I think it's been in me forever. I just had to learn how to feel it."

 

Stiles must've made an unpleasant face at that, because Lydia shifted her bag higher on her shoulder and was suddenly trying to look sympathetic.

 

"But, you know, even when I was convinced I was normal, I did that Latin translation," she said. "It's not like -- "

 

"I know," Stiles said. "I know."

 

"You could ask Deaton," she suggested. In a sick, nauseous wave, the image of choking the life out of her still faintly-bruised neck rose up out of nowhere, and Stiles was so startled by the unimaginable possibility of hurting Lydia that it kicked him halfway out of his funk.

 

"Yeah," he said, scratching vigorously at the back of his head. He still felt itchy under his skin, but the motion helped. "Yeah, I'll give it a shot."


End file.
